Can’t Spell “Summer” Without “Hatred”

After a bitter cold Winter, and inexplicably dry Spring, you have made your return to the Mid-Atlantic region, otherwise known as America’s sweaty armpit. Now, while it’s on record that I despise your existence, I still realize you serve a purpose for the greater good, keeping those in the ice cream and novelties business gainfully employed, and without you, we never would’ve received the glory that was the super soaker, or Stick Stickley, and all the other wonders that came with being a child. Hell, if you weren’t as miserable as you are, we never would’ve had the need to invent air conditioning. I mean, that alone should put you in the running for the Nobel Prize every year. So, while your contributions to the planet are few, they are indeed great.

However, if it was only the unbearable heat that you brought, I could cope, but it’s not. Oh no, everything that lay dormant in the Fall and Winter, slowly begins to return to life in the Spring, then kicks it into high gear when you come around. As a person with allergies, I can’t fault you for your pollen levels without levying some hatred towards Spring and Fall as well, so you will be granted a pass for plant sex making my eyes itch. What I won’t spot you on are the millions of winged and crawly insects that literally come out from under rocks they were hiding.

The existence of some of these creatures aren’t at all that inconvenient:

Ants (AKA nature’s roomba), fireflies and ladybugs: Offer a distraction to keep noisy-ass children out of your house, albeit while fostering some pyromaniac/psychotic tendencies as they take a magnifying glass to anything where torturing it wouldn’t be considering a crime (a small price to pay for silence).

Mosquitoes: While nothing more than flying used syringes, at least serve a purpose for being food for everything else, and removing them would cause irreversible harm to the ecosystem.

There is however, one type of insect that I just can’t find a legitimate use for outside of Mother Nature telling us all to collectively “fuck ourselves”: wasps. Stinging insects are never fun, but wasps (and their even meaner cousin, hornets) reside on a higher plane of stinging dickery. A bee will sting you once, maybe twice, but it has to commit as, regardless of how the target reacts, that bee will die because their stingers are barbed and yanks out its innards when the act is complete. But wasps? Wasps don’t have a barbed stinger, it’s as smooth as a sewing needle. What’s that mean for you?

Well, it means you’re fucked. See, a wasp has to make a conscious decision as to whether it wants to continue stinging you or not. It’s not a “oh, I made my point, he’ll leave me alone now,” process, but rather, “this is boring. I’m bored stinging this guy.” Then it just flies away to ruin someone else’s day. I know what you’re thinking, “but Chris, couldn’t I simply kill the wasp to avoid such torture?” A temporary solution my friend, as, some species of wasps take their dickishness one step further when, upon death, they release a pheromone that alerts their asshole buddies that it latterly got its head caved in, so, instead of one wasp, you now have to deal with a hive looking for blood.

Summer, remember how I praised you for inspiring air conditioning? I’ve lived in homes that have this wonderful contraption as it offers me protection from everything about you that makes you awful. With technology making our lives easier, and businesses embracing the fact that people would rather remain shut-ins than deal with the outside world, I can get everything I could ever need delivered to me for a nominal fee. Factor in things like Skype and various technologies that allow a person to work from home, and I would only need to leave my home it was on fire or blown away, and even that’s debatable. With all this wondrousness that enables my hermit lifestyle, I find it incredibly insulting that you can just say “Fuck you” and allow your winged hellbringers to freely enter my home at their desire. In my daily life, my door is open for no longer than ten seconds total, but in that time, you’ve managed to get three yellow jackets, several different species of spiders, and enough mosquitoes to render a small, South American country infertile. You know when you’re sitting comfortably in your own home, minding your business, and you feel your shirt tag tickling the back of your neck, so you casually brush at it and then YOU GOT STUNG IN THE GOD DAMNED NECK BECAUSE IT WASN’T YOUR TAG!

That’s simply unacceptable. If I had allergies, I could’ve died because of your bullshit.

Now, I like to consider myself a fair individual, and can admit that it’s not entirely your fault that you’re a complete dick. Aside from the heat, humidity, and the crippling realization that as an adult you don’t get three months off so your “bosses” can drown themselves in alcohol, everything disgusting about you takes root in the Spring–the Silver Surfer to your Galactus.